The growing pains of middle-aged women

What are the rites of passage for women who don’t get married or choose to have a family. Career break? Younger boyfriend?

Do emotions and priorities change for women as they get older? (Chris Rout)
Single and childless women have a debate on repeat, summed up by a friend who
asked recently, sounding more than a little panicked: “If you don’t have
kids to force you to grow up, then when, and how, exactly, is it going to
happen?”

I know what she means. If you don’t harvest the big guns of adulthood — scary
mortgage, marriage and, most significantly, progeny — how does a girl
mature? You get heaps of benchmarks in early life. You were 16: legal for
sex and mopeds; 18: could vote; 21: a grown-up now, you passed your driving
test, started your first job. All that remained was the intrinsically
lifestyle-busting married-with-kids.

The proportion of women remaining childless has doubled in recent decades, and
today, 20% of the female population are unmarried and have no children. For
some of us, it can feel that life stretches aimlessly ahead. Our next big
benchmarks